World of Warcraft Guild Leader, Kreeoni

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Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Although WoW is a game it has real world problems, such as Identity Fraud, sort of. I am talking specifically about the problem of being hacked. And as a guild leader or officer it means larger implications and more headaches than just losing your gear. As I mentioned in one of my first posts, one of our officers was hacked a little over a month ago. Seeing as officers had a lot of access to the guild bank we lost a lot of items and about 4,000 gold. Luckily we were able to get back most of the items(although not the gold) and the officer was able to get his account restored. Still, this took about 2-3 weeks before everything was restored.

To help prevent this from happening Blizzard has come up with a little item called the Authenticator.

It's been around a while but out of stock in the Blizzard store until yesterday so I decided that now is the time to let you know about it. It costs you a measly $6.50 (plus tax if applicable and no shipping costs). You associate your account with the authenticator and every time you log in you need to enter the code given on the authenticator. The code changes(it's based of the time I believe) so each time you log in there is a new number for you. You can even associate multiple accounts to the authenticator, just in case you are one of those with a few accounts(or want to share with family members or roommates).

Yes, it is a little annoying to have to do that every time but its either that or get hacked by all the nubs out there who imbed stuff in your favorite addons/websites/etc to keylog your account info so they can get a few thousand gold off you. I'd personally rather not leave it up to chance, especially considering I have access to multiple accounts and lots of resources in the guild bank. I don't want that headache.

If they become sold out again just wait and don't buy them off eBay for $80 a pop. Chances are those are the same people who are hacking your account anyways.

The Blizzard Authenticator can be purchased here. If you aren't using US servers then there are links on the website to purchase Authenticators for other server locations.

Oh and if you play on a Mac, you aren't as safe as you think. The officer who was hacked was a Mac user.